Exploratory Data Analysis | City of Vancouver Street Trees

"By far the greated and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities." _Socrates

Introduction

Trees should be an essential, rather than merely a desirable part of our cities (Ely, Martin, 2009). Street trees provide the city with a wide range of benefits: a friendly environment and a clean atmosphere for humans and animals. The city should compose a habitable environment for the trees. Providing the conditions to grow healthy, long-lived trees is the best approach to minimize the conflicts between trees and the surrounding urban infrastructure. In this analysis, I am going to talk about street trees in the City of Vancouver, and see their distribution of the type, location, and other characteristics to determine if each of the areas is surrounded by trees diversified and if it gives some insight into the area infrastructure in the city environment. I hope my analysis helps some businesses to gain some insightful ideas, and so it ultimately leads to the result of better urban city development and planning for the community.

Description of Data

The original data were obatained from the City of Vancouver's Open Data Portal and follows as City of Vancouver Open Data Portal > Streets and Transportation > Street trees.

UBC Data Science faculty has done of wrangling and cleaning for the origianl dataset, and provided with a modified version of the dataset. The subset of the original data may or may not be a representative sample of the original data set.

The street_trees dataset is a table composed of 21 columns, Unnamed: 0, std_street, on_street, species_name, neighbourhood_name, date_planted, diameter, street_side_name, genus_name, assigned, civic_number, plant_area, curb, tree_id, height_range_id, on_street_block, cultivar_name, root_barrier, latitude, longitude stored in a .csv file.

Dataset schema

The following columns are the dataset schema:

In this study, data visualization methods and techniques were conducted to analyze the information in street_trees dataset.

How Street Trees Can Save Our Cities

How Street Trees Can Save Our Cities

Cities around the world are looking for ways to improve the livability of their cities and street trees are a common and important remedy for urban planning departments. Street trees can improve aspects of city life like air quality, biodiversity, and various beneficial health outcomes. Cities can improve their quality of life by adding trees and other foliage along the side of their roads (UBC Open Case Studies).

Social Impact

Street trees can improve the livability of cities in many different ways. In its lifetime a tree provides us with many benefits. In recent years the idea of street trees have became a popular idea, therefore more people are recognizing the need for it. The street trees have to be the default design for our streets.

Let's dive into the street_trees dataset, and discover the varieties of the public trees on boulevards in the City of Vancouver.

In the city of Vancouver, Platanioides(183) holds the highest number of planted trees throughout the region, followed by Rubrum(142) and Cerasifera(115).

Platanoides, commonly known as the Norway maple, is a species of maple native. It is introduced to North America in the mid-1700s from Eurasia as an ornamental tree. They are widely available from nurseries and occur in southern British Columbia, and from southern Ontario east to Newfoundland (Tree Canada). image1.jpegImage 1

Next, we would like to see the distribution of trees for each neighborhood in the city of Vancouver.

Nature-Friendly Environment

Renfrew-Collingwood is primarily a residential area, with good access to nature. Renfrew Ravine Park, which features a natural creek in the Still Creek watershed, is a lovely place to take a walk. Residents have easy access to services and amenities, especially along the Collingwood stretch of Kingsway. Renfrew-Collingwood runs along the city's east boundary with Burnaby (Area of the city).

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Let's discover more about the top 10 tree species in the City of Vancouver.

Let's create a point map which is one of the simplest ways to visualize geospatial data. Basically, we are going to place a point at each area on the map that corresponds to the street trees.

Top 10 Tree Species in the City of Vancouver

Concluding remarks

In the city of Vancouver, Platanioides(183) holds the highest number of planted trees throughout the region, followed by Rubrum(142) and Cerasifera(115). Renfrew-Collingwood area has the most nature-friendly environment.

Dashboard

References